Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Dowly

The lack of troops is something that is keeping me from playing it. The progress you make is so small against another human because you simply dont have the troops to do anything. Sometimes my squads are so small that I need to combine 3-4 two man squads to get one "full" squad and at the same time, my opponent has 4-5 man squads and he is defending.

I'm all for realism, but one has to balance that with gameplay.

+1. And you also need to balance it with the fact that the Allies, at least, were able to keep on pushing more men into battle. In CC they can quickly lose a battle of attrition that they were never in danger of losing in real life.

ORIGINAL: Pvt_Grunt

I think a smaller maps mod would be good. (As much as I like the new eye candy maps)

If the VL's are set right it can improve the AI attack as well.

It also makes for quicker, sharper battles with less searching, more destroying!

+1. Smaller maps or bigger units. Either would work for me.

xe5. WW2 combat did not primarily involve fire and maneuver. It primarily involved finding, fixing and then bombarding the enemy before mopping up at a tactical scale, with maneuver occurring at an operational scale. As a result (I forget the percentage) the largest proportion of casualties lost in combat during the war resulted from artillery fire.

Furthermore, most accounts of Normandy compare it more closely to WW1 on the Western Front than to the desert or the steppe. It was an attritional contest fought to the point where the Germans simply collapsed. Maneuver, even at an operational level, was fairly minimal.

Finding, fixing, bombarding is manuever and fire. You say potato, I say... An armored infantry btn CO recalled his unit's primary task as being the security escort for FOs. "Too Mny Men" and other sources peg casualties from indirect fire at 60-75%. CC wouldnt be much of a game if either side could hammer the other with 10-12 barrages per battle.

Before Cobra Normandy was a slugfest but, even then, any resemblance to WW1's static battles of attrition was faint. PITF occurs at the tail end of the breakout and was instrumental in the final collapse of the West Wall and the ensuing race to the German border.

"...the Allies, at least, were able to keep on pushing more men into battle. In CC they can quickly lose a battle of attrition that they were never in danger of losing in real life.

A BGs forcepool does allow it to keep pushing more men into battle but, unfortunately the Regimental BGs arent in danger of losing the battle of attrition. Yes a local attack onto a map can quickly be turned back but large BGs remain essentially intact because their frontage is always jut one company wide - those units in the active roster - where in reality regiments routinely operated with a two battalion front. So in any given game time period a regiment will only incur losses on less than a sixth of the force it would actually have engaged in battle. This is somewhat offset by PITF's higher battle tempo but Im finding that neither side risks running out of men or material. I'd like to see interdiction attacks cause forcepool losses in addition to movement block, and to have battle losses multiplied against forcepools proportionately. ie. if a battalion-sized BG lost 20 men in a battle it would then lose 20 men from its forcepool to represent the similar losses incurred by the other company the battalion would normally employ on its front.